I'm needing to use a larger drive for one of my sources so I

[tluxon]

...bought a new HDD, formatted it, and did a bit-for-bit copy of the Channels folder on the drive I wish to replace.

So now I have a [source drive]:\Channels folder that holds a "Movies" and a "TV" folder and a [New bigger drive]:\Channels folder that holds the same "Movies" and "TV" folder as depicted in the screenshot of part of Beyond Compare below:

My question is what is the cleanest way to swap the new drive ("W") for the old drive ("F") and not mess up the Channels Library? Can I just pause the Channels server, remove the old drive, change the drive letter for the new drive to "F", and resume the Channels server? Or is there a better and/or simpler way?

Thanks!

[tluxon]

Well that didn't go as planned. The new drive (W:, 10TB) had been formatted on a USB3 SATA Dock where it sat while I copied all of the files from the smaller older drive (F:, 4TB). I've done this on several drives as they aged out of my system and never had an issue. This included another 10TB drive that replaced a 3TB drive, both NTFS on GPT partition drives.

When I made the swap, the new 10TB drive was not seen by Windows at all even though it was listed by the BIOS. I spent a significant time messing around with this and ultimately had to put everything back to the starting point. I read somewhere that formatting on a USB dock can affect the sector size and starting offset so that the drive would not be usable as an internal drive without re partitioning and reformatting, but I have never had that issue before. Besides, Windows would have to know the drive was there in order to re-initialize, re-partition, and re-format it anyway, so I don't suspect that is what I'm seeing here.

Anybody have any ideas on how I might be able to overcome this hurdle?

Thanks!

[slampman]

Did the drive show in disk manager? If it was found in the bios it should show in there even if it doesn't in windows explorer. I've only ever seen drives not show in explorer when there always a drive letter conflict or they weren't formatted etc.

[tluxon]

That's what I meant by "not seen by Windows" is that it didn't appear in Disk Management.

A note to add here. The last two 10TB drives I've used this sequence on were renewed Enterprise drives from Amazon, which had the following mention:

"4Kn format, please check compatibility in your system. (Some old system doesn't support 4Kn format)"

I don't think this is an issue, because they've both worked fine in the USB dock and the first drive just moved into a SATA port without any surprises. I expected the same on the second one but apparently something is different. It may be a drive letter conflict in a table somewhere because I've used every letter at one time or another, but I'm not aware of such a thing.